Lessons

Lesson Info

Lightroom Overview

So let's go in tow light room now and give you a brief overview of what is in the program. And remember, we're talking about light room adobe Light room for the desktop. We're not talking about light room. Classic like Room Classic is that workhorse. It's the professional tool that most people use to get through thousands and thousands of images. We're on Lee talking about light room, the new version of light room that just came out within the last couple of years. So we're going into light room and, by the way, light rooms going to look very similar. Whether it's on your IPad, whether it's on a mobile device, whether it's on your desktop or even if it's in on a browser and you're looking at it on a friend's browser, it's gonna look fairly similar. And that's, ah, really cool thing. Because no matter where you are, you kind of have the same feel. The same tools, the same options. Eso we're gonna focus mostly on the desktop program of light room. We'll get into little bits and pieces of...

what you can do on your lap on your IPad and on your phone. But mostly we'll just work inside of light room desktop. So here we are, inside of light room desktop, and, uh, what you'll notice is that over on the left hand side, A to the very top is where you'll find the add photos button. That's your import. That's how you get images in, um, then below. That is a learn discover area, which is just for learning purposes. You can click on that at your leisure, but right below that is where you find all of the photos themselves. Now remember that light room is not organizing things, but folder by folder by folder. You're not putting images in a folder and then importing those folders into light room instead, what you're doing is you're importing them directly into light room and light room is storing him based on its own internal structure, which is really based on date. So it's putting folders, and it's saying he shot this on this day, I'm putting the photos in there. Light Room doesn't care what the topic is, doesn't care if it's people doesn't care if it's weddings, just gonna organize it the way it wants to organize it. The only way that you find images is by metadata. And this here this all photos area recently added by date, by people by connections and even deleted photos. These are metadata driven locations there. They're not actual physical locations. They are virtual pots of images that have things collected based on metadata. So if you want to find an image that you shot on a specific date, you simply open up by date, go to the date that you shot the image and find that specific day, and then you will find all the photos that were shot then. So, uh, these air all metadata driven right recently added as things that you've imported into light room, Um, people is going to show you a group of people. So it's literally looking at all your photos, and it's finding the faces, and it's trying to collect them based on those faces, all based on artificial intelligence. That's in the cloud based on Adobe senses. The tool that's in the cloud that's doing that. We'll talk a little bit more about that when we talk about finding images and then, of course below. That is a thing called connections and connections are simply projects that you are putting together. So a set of images that you're putting together and that you're using a this connection in order to send it to a vendor of some sort. So White House custom color is a printer Blurb Books is a book. Bynder e SmugMug is an online website, and Adobe Portfolio is also ah website that you can create specifically for yourself literally. If you're paying for an adobe light room subscription, you have a website available to you that you can create. So that's where that is now, below all of that, you'll find the albums. Now. Albums are not folders, their virtual locations. So again, all the images air parked inside of folders that light room controls. You don't have any control over where light room is storing individual photos. You have control over what? How you collect those images into albums. If you're a light room classic user, you will be aware of ah topic or an idea called collections. Collections and albums are exactly the same thing. So in light room, we call them albums and albums is where we grab images, and we put those images into these albums so that we can find them based on idea based on person based on job based on travel. Eso, for instance. Here's my European travel. This is when I went to Europe with my family. It is an album, and it is parked inside of a folder so we can create folders. This one says light room lessons. And then inside them, we can have various albums in order to create them. We simply go up to the top and click on this little plus button, and when we click on the plus button, we either create an album or we create a folder. If you create the folder first, that's going to create one of these folders right here, this light learn lessons folder and then once you've created that, you can then say create an album and you can tell it to put it inside the light room Lessons folder here because I'm already inside that folder or you can actually drag things around. So if you have a album that you've created, you can grab that album and drag it into a folder, and now it's organized so that you don't have hundreds and hundreds of albums just kind of scattered around. You organize them based on personal, based on jobs based on travel. However you wanna organize them, but that's where you organize your images. Now in the middle is where you see the images and the images. They're always either gonna be in a grid like this, which is kind of a masonry style grid, which I like. It's very pretty. It's mostly it's all about the images. I can Onley see images. I don't see any extra space or I could go to the grid and that this is down at the very bottom in the toolbar. If I go to grid, then I see all the images in a grid and they've got data on them so you can see that they've got star ratings, got flags. They've got information about whether they're sink, what kind of file they are. You can see that they have tags on them that tell you these air DMG files. So this is where all the information is about your photos. And then there's the detail view which, if I click on this now, I've got an image. One image available to me on Ben. I can use the arrows to cycle through, Um, or I could just click on images down below to move from one image to the next. And when I'm in one of these grid modes, I can also sort those images based on either a custom order star rating file name, captured date. That's usually the way I like to do it. If it's by captured eight, then I know that at the beginning or the end is the first or last photo, and you can also tell it to reverse the order. Eso It's very simple down here. There's not a lot of options. Um, right here at the very bottom is where you add your stars and your flags. And then, of course, you can change the size of those thumbnails so that they're very small or very large. Unfortunately, they don't get any larger than this. I wish they would get a lot larger, which is why I usually end up in this mode, which is our masonry style mode, because that's the biggest I can possibly make these photos. Now up at the very top, you'll find a search bar and a filter, So the search bar in the filter is where you would type in information about what you want to find or use the filter toe. Look for specific things like, for instance, star ratings flags, type of photo keywords in photos. The cameras that were involved, the locations that were involved, sink status, meaning Are they synchronized? Are they upon the cloud? That kind of stuff on, then people that are associate ID inside of this current album that I happen to be looking in. I can see all of these specific people okay. Oh, and contributors. Contributors is a completely different animal. It's when people are sharing images into you because you can share your images to other people and they can share their images with you so you can actually inside of your light room. You can see other people's photos. That's what that means. We'll cover that a little bit later, but it's just kind of a nice little feature, but it's it's kind of still in its infant stage, so I look for that to change. In the next year or so, it'll start to advance and become better and better and better, but right now it's kind of in its infant stage where we start to share images back and forth. Okay, and then on the right hand side is where all of your information about these photos is. You'll see over on the right. At the very bottom is an info panel. So I click on the info button and I'll see all this info I've got. What? Which albums? The images in. So I confined. If I'm looking at a specific album, I can see all of the albums that that thing is in. And remember, because an album is a virtual place, you can put these images in individual albums. You could put it in different albums, and so it doesn't it doesn't duplicate the file. It's just happens to be in five different albums. And so I confined the album that it's in. If I'm looking for that image, because let's say I find this image, and I know that I want to find one next to it. I can always go to the Info panel and find the other albums that air there. Also, the sink status that tells us a little bit about this now. This one was actually synchronized from Light Room Classic because I use light room classic and so I can actually put images in light room. Classic. They go up to the cloud the cloud then takes them down to me here, inside of light room. Desktop is well, and if I put him in light room desktop sends them to the cloud, sends them to light room classic so that the two programs can actually work seamlessly back and forth together. Um, this synchronization status just tells you where the original file is and how many copies and what kind of copies Air resident and you'll see here. I'm working on smart previews, which is just a good is working on the original file because I could do everything that I could do on the original file to a smart preview. And I can even print it and share it do stuff like that. Um, but the original file is just much bigger, so I can also see exactly where I shot this. So you see, there's a map here. If I click on, it will take me to a Google map. I can see information about the file, including where it was, uh, where it was captured and when it was captured. The file name and the copyright information and Aiken enter in title and caption information here and then at the very top is all of the metadata about 100 eyes. So 200 millimeter lens 6.3. So all of that kind of stuff is up here, all right. And then we have the tag area, the tag areas where we would add keywords so you can add keywords right here, and it will add keywords. And you don't need to add keywords like lake, because light room can actually find a lake based on artificial intelligence. It confined a lake for you, so really, you don't have to look for you don't have to add keywords like lake, and you don't even have. If you have GPS on your phone, you don't have to add where the location is, either because it's tracking that location, the things that you would adhere arm or things like metaphoric key words or keywords about certain, like certain buildings that you're photographing or certain groups like If you were photographing a A, uh ah band. Well, the AI is not going to know that you were photographing a certain band, so you'd wanna put their name in there. So that's the kind of stuff that you wanna put in this stuff that artificial intelligence couldn't figure out. Like red building. You don't need that anymore. It used to be that key words were really critical and finding images. But now we have a I so we don't have thio eso That's where you add keywords. This is where so the one up above it has a little quote. Looks like a little quote bubble. This is where you get comments. So if someone comments on your images that you've posted through the light room Web portal, um, when people comment and heart your images, all of that information will come back here and you'll be able to see it right here in this panel. Okay, that's all of the informational stuff. And then up at the top, we have several things. Let's start at the very, very top where we have a cloud feature and that cloud tells us whether or not we're all sink and backed up. So right now, according to light room, I have everything sink and backed up, which means that whatever's on my computer is also in the cloud, and so I'm really safe and backed up, and there's nothing pending. There's no like adjustments or photos that need to be uploaded or downloaded. You can also click on these links, and it'll take you to various things like your plan or to your light room Web account. Things like that. There's a help menu. There's a share menu, which we'll talk about later. And then there's also on alert menu here. Um, those air fairly well, the export or the share option is very important. The others were kind of minimal. All right, And then we have the adjustments and the adjustments here. This is your edit menu. If you click on E, it will take you to the edit menu. Then you have crop. Then you have the healing brush. Then you have the normal brush. This is where you do burning and dodging, and then you have a linear Grady int, which is where you'll like burn in a sky or, uh, you know, brighten up or darken down a wall or something like that. And then you'll have the radial radiant, which is a circular version of the regular Grady Int instead of a line, It's a circle, and we'll talk about those a lot more. And then you have this little three button, uh, button down here when you click it. It's just a drop down menu with things like copy and paste show the original, that kind of stuff. Okay, so that is an overview of light room. Now you know where everything is because, unlike Light Room Classic, which is actually quite complicated and has all sorts of different areas and has has what they call modules and it's there's a lot of places toe look, light room desktop. The new version of Light Room has Onley one panel, so it's just always there. Everything is always there, right in front of you. You don't have to change from one module to another. You don't have to do anything special to get from one place to another. It's all ever present in front of you, which is really nice. The U I on it is absolutely fantastic, and because it's the same pretty much on your IPad or on your IPhone. Then when you go from one to the other, it's pretty seamless. So now that we've toured light room. Now it's time to talk about organizing and working with light room to find your photos.